GUEST MUSE LETTER SERIES: I want to have voices – On Hélène Cixous' Medusa
The Muse Letter No. 110
Occasionally I publish essays by fellow Muses. This one is by Foteine König.
Foteine König holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature, as well as a MA in Cultural Studies with an emphasis on feminist theory. Currently, she works at a cozy book store as well as at a German University where she coordinates an academic publication project. Sharing her writing with an audience is a step she has taken only recently. In 2021 she was published in the Berlin-based Magazin Almost (Space Issue) with a text about rearranging oneself after a break-up and breakdown. A larger project she is engaged in at the moment is a collage of essays and (auto)fictional texts dealing with, e.g., mental health, intergenerational bonds between women, issues of belonging and identity, female representation, as well as German-Greek relations through history and her( )story. She writes in English and German. You can contact her via Instagram @f.linde .
I want to have voices
by Foteine Margarita König
A few years ago when I was doing my MA, I had to write a paper for a philosophy seminar on deconstruction and post-structuralism and I was deeply lost. I struggled with my studies in general and questioned the greater purpose of them. On the verge of dropping the seminar, I remembered that I had come across the writings of Hélène Cixous in a gender studies course in an earlier semester. Even though I was intrigued, her work did not fit with my topic back then. But for this paper and my state of mind it was perfect. A French feminist with a wide spectrum of different texts — some poetical, some personal, some philosophical, some political, but most of them all of that at the same time. A woman with an inexplicable mind and a way with language completely new to me.
I started to immerse myself into her words because you cannot just read them. Her language is an ocean full of milky tears and dark laughter. You never know when the next wave will hit you in the face and leave you completely bewildered, astonished, maybe even aroused. You can sing her words. I came upon her Medusa. The mythological monster, the shameless seductress, the mad woman with a head full of snakes and deadly eyes – as told in the patriarchal narrative. In Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa, published in 1975, she is not a monster though. She is a beautiful woman who resists and laughs and flies on and on and on. With Medusa as the guardian of the essay, Cixous urges her readers to rise through writing. A so-called feminine way of writing that dodges long established and exclusionary paradigms. It is a manifesto about breaking free and even more about breaking open.
Every time I read the essay I discover new themes, details, and irritations which is why it is so hard to give a concise summary. I also spent quite some time studying the critiques. There are plenty and I get them. One can read the text as essentialist, outdated and unrelated to the everyday lives of people suffering oppression. But it can also be read as a political testament to a queer and expressionist revolution. You can use her words as inspiration for a broad agenda to change the exploitative system we call global modernity, or as a guiding light for yourself while writing down your most private thoughts in the safe haven of your bedroom.
‘I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant.’
Medusa has not left my thoughts since then. When my eyes wander through my shelves and stumble upon Cixous' book, I always feel an encouraging twinge. Medusa follows me like a ghost, like a shadow, urging me to start and be bold. On random occasions, her laughter pops up in my mind like the echo of a broken record, reminding me:
‘Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery’.
In 2019, about two years after writing about Cixous, I read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy. I only bought it because I remembered that I loved Swimming Home when I grabbed it by chance in a book store during a trip in Scotland back in 2014. This time, I was on a trip as well and I took Hot Milk with me. When I opened the book I gasped. There she was. Medusa. Medusa by Cixous. Staring back at me with her big, beautiful eyes, not turning me into cold, hard stone, but into a ball soft as clotted cream, full of admiration and inspiration. Levy opens the book with a quote from the essay and throughout the story, Medusa – the mythological figure, Cixous’ interpretation as well as the actual animal also known as jellyfish – is a sustaining constant and the poetic basis of the protagonist’s psychological journey.
‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits.’
So she was still out there, haunting not only me but also the great ones like Levy. I could not be wrong then. I looked at the page with the publisher’s details. The book was published the same year I wrote my paper on Cixous (I call that random magic and I cherish it). Without knowing what the plot was about, I took Hot Milk to Greece, where I was born. I was lying on a rocky beach looking at the Libyan Sea — some say Libya is the motherland of Medusa — and discovered that Sofia, Levy’s main character, and I were not that different.
While Sofia travels to Athens to talk to her estranged father, I sat on a Greek island, still unsure if I wanted to look for mine for the first time in 25 years. I asked the sea in front of me what blood means if you already have a dad that does not share yours. Why did Sofia and I fail our driver's license so many times? Was it because we were educated by anthropology and philosophy but not the actual world right in front of us? Are people disappointed in us if we do not live up to their expectations of Greek ancestry? Will I get my father-tongue back? Am I beheaded or beloved? We kiss boys and pine for girls. What does beheaded even mean? I yearn to be bold, but I am mostly confused.
A self-pitying and deplorable version of me would have been furious that I was not the mastermind behind Hot Milk. Why am I not able to be this great? A few issues were so deeply rooted in me, why did I fail to express them? A greedy and presumptuous version would think I could have written that book myself. That these were exactly my themes, that it was partly my life Levy wrote about. That it was my adoration for Cixous and Medusa, not hers. Thank goodness none of those disturbing alter-egos showed up. The thing that kept showing up was Medusa and everything she provokes in me.
The Medusa theme is still used in some literary and feminist circles. Her occasional omnipresence does not diminish my thoughts and personal attachment to the figure. I do not need her as my exclusive North Star, I can share. We can all benefit from her. I want to be true to myself (dare I say authentic?!) rather than original, because sometimes your truth is a far more original attempt than trying to be different only for the sake of being special – to paraphrase Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic hit hard). It is the same with the ocean or the moon.
One should accept that many people share a special bond with them, that does not lessen the importance of an individual connection.
Even though I have been committed to a feminist mindset for years, there was this misogynistic voice inside me that told me I was just one of the many naive and narcissistic women who believed their confessional writing had any meaning or power. Reading Hot Milk and stumbling once again upon Cixous and Medusa reassured me that I was ok and allowed to write. And this actually may be a bit narcissistic because I know I just want to see those coincidences, but in a moderate spiritual way I think that I was meant to read Cixous when I struggled with academia and thought they took away all the fun; when I feared that even philosophy was so linear and stubborn and male and offered no place to think freely and appreciate a mind that entangles itself like a rhizome. Cixous came along and showed me a different approach to explore my thoughts, and I got the best feedback from a professor during my eight years as a student. I think I was meant to read Levy on that hot and windy beach feeling connected to Sofia. It is obvious that even though there are themes and concepts in Hot Milk that are painfully true to me, that there are probably even more that are not.
‘And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’
After this trip, I started writing again and have not stopped since. I scribble down childhood memories and those of the last years. I write down truth but also fiction that feels more genuine than actual events. I jump between German and English whilst the melody of a Greek lullaby twinkles in the background. I always hesitate to call my notes and even the cleaner and neater written pages part of a book or a project. I should start calling it that. I do not know where it will go when I type the last words. Probably nowhere, but that is not even the point. The point is that finding Medusa for the second time in a strange phase of my life has given me the courage and joy to allow the thoughts to come, to write down connections I see in my life and literature or history.
I like the feeling of being part of a big web spun by life and ideas. Sofia and I were stung by Medusa and she left a mark on us.
Sofia wonders:
'I am overflowing like coffee leaking from a paper cup. I wonder, shall I make myself smaller? Do I have enough space on earth to make myself less?'
And Cixous understands:
'I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows of unheard-songs. Time and again, I too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.'
I hear Medusas laughter as an invitation to think and dance, to question and scream, to giggle and write, to lose and find myself. An invitation to try. And that is all I need and can hope for right now, because it means trusting me, giving my voice credit, and daring to share it with an audience no matter what size. I love seeing Medusa appear as a graffiti on a building or hearing about her on a podcast. It is like she is whispering that I shall go on and further, that she will appear and disappear, but never leave. Thinking and writing about Medusa, Cixous and Levy, I realise: my heroines are my muses. Cixous once wrote ‘I have this need to let myself be haunted by voices coming from my elsewheres that resonate through me. I want to have voices.’
That is the point. They help me to hear my voices.
Notes:
The quote 'I am overflowing...' is from: Levy, Deborah: Hot Milk. London: Penguin Books 2017.
The quote in the last paragraph about voices is from: Cixous, Hélène: White Ink. Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. by Susan Sellers, New York: Columbia University Press 2008.
All other indented quotes are from: Cixous, Hélène (1975): The Laugh of the Medusa, transl. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in: Signs, 1976, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 875-893.
If you want to read The Laugh of the Medusa in German I recommend the first official translation which was only made in 2013 (!!!) by Claudia Simma. Besides the essay by Cixous, the book includes various texts with different perspectives on Cixous and her writing: Hutfless, Esther u.a. (Hg.): Hélène Cixous. Das Lachen der Medusa zusammen mit aktuellen Beiträgen. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2013.
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Next week
I will share the first excerpt of my new book “Things I Have Loved” which will only get published if you support the Kickstarter. Yes that’s right, if the goal is not reached, I will not receive any money and the book will not happen. (hint, to make a pledge now here XX)
And also on the 20.11.2022 I will do a live reading of an essay and a short Q&A on Instagram at 6PM. Follow me @sophiahembeck.
Last week
I introduced the theme of the month “Myths & Muses” and the paid subscribers got a list of things I am looking forward to in November read it here.
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